My legacy device was a Sony Walkman - so I never had to bother about kludges like this 
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ok… question now: I’m fixing “Performed by” editing tracks credits as per instructions above 
question is: … will the fix stick also for unidentified albums the day they will be identifiable? 
1.3 is a major improvement, especially the Compositions functionality. When the analysis finishes in another couple of days I plan to be all over that like a hawk over a sick chicken.
The revival of this thread has however reinforced my gloom on the tagging front, which is what led me to start this thread, and many others to start or contribute to this or similar ones.
Unless I am not yet up to speed on the new functions (which I confess is entirely possible, and I hope that I am wrong), we still cannot tell Roon to look for types of data which are already in the tag, just not where Roon looks, if it looks at all.
In other words, no field mapping function or the like. Once we can liberate the data inserted and groomed with so much effort, broad horizons of pleasure beckon.
But not yet, alas.
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Well, it does look - and it’s now documented what it looks for: http://kb.roonlabs.com/Import_Settings
Also, some ideas for best practice in tagging to help Roon: http://kb.roonlabs.com/File_Tag_Best_Practice
I’m still wandering in the wilderness. As a test, I pointed Roon 1.3 to the part of my collection that is better-curated, the rest is an even bigger mess.
I can’t possibly go back and retag 1000+ albums. My best shot is if Roon correctly identifies my albums and then uses its own metadata instead.
However, so far, I’m not getting a good feeling. Just something simple isn’t doing what I want. I select Composers, tick the slider for classical composers only, and then select a composer. I then get a list. It’s not albums - what I really want - but what Roon seems to think I want, which are Works. Which would be fine, but then many, many, tracks are not being correctly grouped into works, so are showing up individually.
What I’d like to do - conceptually: select a composer, say Mahler. Select a work by the composer, say Symphony No. 3. I have 4 different ones in my collection. Select the San Francisco Symphony version with MTT conducting. I have both the DSD and the CD rips in my collection. Select the DSD version.
Instead, I am presented with - chaos.
Just as an exercise - I’m going album by album to see how well Roon matched up. It’s a mixed bag. The biggest problem I’ve run into is that occasionally, an album doesn’t exist in the Roon (Rovi?) database.
In that case, Roon doesn’t let me group tracks into compositions - at least if it does, I haven’t found a wayyet.
which makes me ask… could Roon, please, use the “Grouping” tag at least for unidentified classical albums? 
Ok - I spent about 2 hours, and managed to clean up about 10% of my collection in Roon. At this rate, I have 18 hours to go.
But for this privilege, I have to pay these guys $119/yr or $499/life? Hmm.
So here is what I am struggling with. This isn’t even related to metadata - I am just fixing up albums once Roon has analyzed them. I’m going album by album.
- Some albums don’t exist in the Roon DB. For these, I can’t find a way to group tracks into Works.
- I have albums that are duplicates, but I want to see them all, along with some distinguishing tag. How do I do that. For example, I have Mahler 6, SFS/MTT. I have DSD64/2ch (ripped from SACD), DSD64/2ch (purchased from download site), DSD64/5.1ch from SACD. How can I keep all the rich content from the Roon DB, but add a distinguishing field or tag?
- I made a poor decision a long time ago for some of my ripped CDs to create separate album tags for each work, so associating albums with metadata requires merging. This area is a real mess.
I could go on. Does Roon have any personalized support for the amount they’re charging? Or do I just have to post on these forums to get answers?
I guess the thing I’m really struggling with is this. I want to make an honest effort to try Roon to see what the fuss is about. But so far, I just find myself getting very angry. I realize there are probably some advanced techniques and features that can perhaps do what I need.
Or maybe, 1.3 was a modest, but insufficient step forward towards making Roon compelling for classical music. I could just wait for a few more releases. Whatever the reason, when a product engenders anger instead of warm fuzzies, it doesn’t incent one to whip out the credit card.
If anyone from Roon wants to actually understand how frustrating their product is, they’re welcome to contact me.
This should help with the albums that aren’t in the Roon database:
Scroll down until you find the section header of the same name.
Hi Jeff,
Thanks for the tip. I will give it a try.
But it does raise a question. I thought the general philosophy of Roon was to index music with metadata that was internal to Roon - i.e. did not live in the files themselves. By that model, Roon takes input from the embedded tags or from its metadata provider(s), and populates its index appropriately, and you then have control to prefer one or the other. However, once this has happened, is there no way in the Roon GUI itself to make further changes?
The article referenced above seems to be saying that if you want to bend Roon to your will (their words), you should go back to the file’s tags and add stuff. But isn’t there a way to just do the same in the Roon GUI? This is what I thought Roon was about. So in my example of an album not found in the Roon DB - I still had track names from the files metadata. I selected all the tracks that comprised a work. and then I was looking for an option to create a Work that I could name and associate these tracks with.
It seems like Roon’s approach is that whatever they can’t get from their provider, you must feed through tags, and no editing is possible within the Roon GUI itself? A strange choice.
Also - is there a way to browse where when you select Composers, you can see Albums instead of Works?
OK, more reading suggests what I want to use is the Version field in the album?? Here again - I can’t just directly edit or add the Version field in an already imported album? From the GUI? If I’m reading right, I need to backtrack, open the track files in a tag editor, add a Version tag, save the file, and then look for Roon to re-import the file, since it’ll detect the files have changed.
Sigh.
Hi Rajiv,
To get part of what you’re looking for, go to Settings > General and select both Show Album Format on Browser and also Show Album Version on Browser.
Take a look at those Albums and see what that shows you.
Now, if you want to add more information, you can select an album, click the 3 dot icon, then select Edit. From there, go to the Edit Fields tab and scroll down to Version and make your change.
You can also select mulitiple albums at once, by right clicking or long press, and select Edit at the top right of the screen. From there you can Edit the version field.
Hope that helps.
Cheers, Greg
Yes, thank you, that is very helpful.
But now another wrinkle. Since when browsing Composers, Roon displays Compositions, not Albums, I cannot distinguish between multiple versions of a composition, because the two main ways I would do that is by Version, or Album Format (i.e. DSD64, 24/96 etc), and neither of those is shown with Compositions.
Scratching my head on what to do there.
Feeling your pain, Rajiv.
You, me and many thousands of others independently chose much the same route, including things like using Artist and Album Artist for Composer (because it WORKS), putting a lot of performer info in Comments and splitting albums into separate folders to match compositions. It was a lot of work, but in normal players, exemplified by JRiver, it worked well to deliver the results we wanted to see.
Then Roon comes along, offering to take away all these hassle, and suddenly our carefully constructed folder structures are not merely obsolete, they’re wrong, because in order to transcend the cd structure, Roon has to have the cds complete to recognise them in the first place. A wicked irony.
So I am doing massive amounts of retro editing to help Roon recognise the chopped up bits, but still resist reconstituting the cds in single folders, as then any other player will no longer show what we want. Roon is great, I’m a lifetimer, but it doesn’t necessarily offer what I want in all situations, so the other players still have a role. And they need the adapted folder structure.
So I am not willing to convert my tags to suit Roon alone, and have settled for a compromised experience while I go on hoping that Roon will really open up to letting us tell it where in the tags to look for the information it needs.
Roon is not perfect for classical music (but no player is) and I struggle too getting things the way I want them
(I am too one of those who use “Artist” for Composer )
but, re sub-folders… it’s “the other players” that are doing it wrong: I always sticked to 1 folder = 1 album (for multi-disc albums too) and never had issues in any of the (not so many) players I have used
for works and similar stuff there are specific tags a player should use
Hi Simon and Paolo,
Thanks for your perspective. I still have Roon for a month or a bit longer, so I am not making any final declarations. But I strongly suspect I will not renew or subscribe.
After wrestling with it for a few hours, I stepped back and reflected on this question: what is Roon giving me? I think that for a lot of people, and Roon’s core customer set, it is the rich metadata, and the seamless ability to explore new music from outside your collection.
Well, I don’t think I’m one of those people. For me, it is all about - find what I’m looking for easily, and play my music with maximum fidelity. That may sound monkish, but I suspect I am not alone. I am actually very happy with running MinimServer and using control points like Lightning DS or Lumin to stream music to my Aries. For the metadata fans, this is incomprehensible, which is why they pressured me - “you have to try Roon, it’ll blow your mind!”
For me, the main reasons I would want something like Roon, and be willing to pay the stiff fee, would be:
- Take an imperfectly tagged collection, and render a beautiful, elegant, result. Clearly for classical, that is a tall order, and even 1.3 is far from there. Indeed, my experience with it is more like wrestling a frisky pet, or playing whack-a-mole. Just when you think you’ve bent it to your will, a new problem pops up.
- Software unfolding of Tidal MQA. I realize this is coming, and it is certainly attractive. But could I not apply that $499 lifetime fee to a new MQA DAC instead?
- Fast and rich search capabilities. Here again, Roon shows promise, but it’s hardly a Google. The Focus tool is quite nice, but I would prefer to have richer filters, to be honest.
These are the considerations I’ll be pondering for the duration of my 60-day trial.
I think you need to spend more time getting to know Roon. Exactly this has been possible since Roon 1.0.
Go to Menu (Hamburger top left)
Select Composers
Chose Mahler
Either scroll to Symphony no. 3 or type it in the filter box, then select work
You will see an ordered list of performances including MTT’s
Either just play that performance, or select it to select different versions (DSF, FLAC etc)
It’s part of the basic function of Roon. There is no chaos in work flow.
Being a longtime JRiver user myself I beg to disagree. There always was a composer tag in JRiver and you always had the possibility to create custom tags for a “work”. You did in a way what I think you blame Roon to have done: you took an existing tag structure and redefined its meaning to suit your needs…
I went the other path, created a lot of custom tags and used the COMPOSER tag, because IT WORKS… now what is the correct way?
You will always have disagreement about this. For example, I never cared about external players that only display ARTIST and ALBUM, so I used the ARTIST tag and the ALBUM tag as intended and created additional custom tags to cater for classical.
If you have the ARTIST tag populated with the composer and you use JRiver it should be a very easy task to copy tags over to COMPOSER.
I have complained a lot about Roon pre 1.3. for its handling of classical music but I really like the changes they have applied with 1.3. There’s still a way to go and I expect that it never will fit my needs 100% but that is because we will never reach agreement on how to tag classical music.
What I personally would like to see in the future is to fully be able to fill Roon database fields from tags, because I already have all works and composers tagged properly. Add to that the ability to add reviews, artist and work descriptions and allow the user to globally “unidentify” all albums I’d be more than happy. So the users who would want to benefit from 3rd party metadata could while others that like their own metadata better could fill Roon with their data.
As the OP said: the number of unidentified albums is still very high and probably will not go down significantly in the future. I also would rather prefer to use my tags than having a mix of Roon data and my own.
But let’s wait and see how it develops.
But if you’e doing all the heavy lifting, and tag grooming, then what is the point of the very expensive Roon software at all? Why not continue to use JRiver, or in my case, the free-of-cost MinimServer?
Fair point.
I do feel it would be useful to carry forward the Album Format and Version information to the Performances/Compositions list. Like all of us, I’m sure, I frequently have multiple performances of the same composition in my library. I’d like to know at a glance in this view what the format is.
I did discover, to your point, that I could click through from a composition back to the album that contains it, to determine the format information, but it’s an extra step.